Christmas in Bangkok

21/01/2017 : After being on holiday, being constantly on the move, “travelling” I think is what the cool kids call it, for five months, you’d think I’d have some wisdom to share. At least I’d hope I’d have some wisdom to share, but I’m not sure I do. The world seems no bigger than it did before we set out: it’s fecking huge, and setting foot on different continents and experiencing its enormity doesn’t change the fact that “fecking huge” is still and will always be beyond my comprehension. I don’t feel changed in any way: maybe if I could visit myself on holiday day #1 and compare notes I’d find slight differences between me now and me then, but nothing near enough to make a claim like “I’ve become a new person,” or anything more than I was was before I’d been fortunate enough to be able to save up the money and the time to spend nearly half a year pissing around in different countries. I think the expectation of taking a massive holiday is to find enlightenment along the way, but to do that I would need to first understand what the term means when applied to a person living in 2017. The world looks no different to when I set off. Things have changed and, in my opinion, for the worse, but the filter I see things through is the same. Maybe that’s more of a reflection of my stubbornness than anything else. Don’t get me wrong: Big Holiday has been The Best. Exploring is what I like to do and bitching about what I see and the people I meet is second nature. Occasionally I’ve had experiences, and made friends that I will remember and talk (boast) about for years and I’m extremely grateful for that. And the challenge (I hate saying challenge - see volunteering in Mexico blog) of leaving behind a comfortable life has been thrilling. But now I’m ready for home time. And while I’m excited that “home” is a new city, I look forward to the day that it’s not. Because while new friends are good, I miss the ones I had. When you crave new experiences and feed your face with cities and cultures you never dreamed you’d see and feel almost wrong in your privilege in being able to do so, the side effect is that nothing is familiar. Maybe my enlightenment is that familiarity is something I’d never seen as a positive before.

We travelled by day from Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand to Bangkok, in the south of the elephant’s face. The reason we didn’t take the overnight bus was because there was a Christmas pub quiz on our last night in Chiang Mai, and we’ll do anything for a bit of festive trivia, including - it turns out - spend twelve daytime hours on an uncomfortable (bouncing) bus with only each other, a packet of crisps, and some slightly disappointing episodes of Black Mirror for company. I’m glad we stayed though as after we’d discovered how little we knew about Christmas-related topics and thoroughly failed to come anywhere near top, Quizteama Aguilera headed to a nearby bar, got drunk, and realised that dancing to reggae versions of pop songs could be really, really fun. I doubt we’ll ever see any of our team mates again, but in that weird uniting moment of being far away from our families when there are only three more sleeps, they were my favourite people that night.

Twelve hours on a bus, in spite of the naps, plus the two hours it took us to get from the bus station to the hostel we’d booked in Bangkok (including a taxi to the metro station as the transport system is designed so the bus and train stations are separated by about fifty motorways), meant we were good for nothing but dinner and bed on our first night in The Big City. We’d splashed out on a twenty-euro room, with its own bathroom, which was great until we realised that the bathroom being integrated into the bedroom and separated by a chest-height wall meant using the toilet became a game of either Here’s What My Trumps Sound Like (in my case) or Kick Your Partner Out Into The Hallway (in Pól’s case).

The next morning - Christmas Eve - dawned hot and polluted, and we had a lot to do. Our first mission was to buy me a Christmas laptop (although I stress that laptops are for life, not just for Christmas) as searching for a job on a crappy android phone was proving as difficult as trying to write your memoirs on toilet paper (and I’ve tried). I’d read online somewhere (or maybe on a sheet of bog roll) that prices for electronics in Vietnam were ludicrous, and so had set my sights on buying one before we got there. Bangkok is big, but there’s a metro system, so it was only a forty-minute journey to the Pantip Plaza - home of all things computer - and the accompanying disappointment of realising that the price of everything was about double what you’d pay in Europe. Again, fortunately, it was only another forty minutes back to the hostel, and we stopped off at the Erawan Shrine on the way to scratch our heads and wonder what all the fuss was about. It’s a very pretty shrine, but very small, and reminded me of projects we used to make in primary school when we were allowed to use the shiny paper. There were lots of people there who looked like they knew what it was all about, but we had people to meet so we buggered off to give them a little more space for the dancing and incense lighting.

The people, who we had to meet that is, were a colleague from Spain and his friend. They happened to be in Bangkok for Christmas and so, in need of some company and appreciative of a familiar face that didn’t belong to me (in Pól’s case) or Pól (in my case), we had enthusiastically agreed to meet. Apart from our visit from Fannegan and the quiz team in Chiang Mai, Thailand had been quite a lonely time for us. As Pól put it - the social media butterfly that he is - we hadn’t added anyone on facebook for a while. Maybe we knew we were nearing the end of Trip and were running out of steam. Maybe we’re just awful people and other backpackers had learned to give us a wide berth. Anyways, it didn’t matter, as we were off to meet friends, friends! At the entrance of the Royal Palace. “That’s probably not the smartest place to meet,” said the smart one to the not-so-smart-one in our two-person Travel Team. “Don’t worry,” I replied, “there’ll be an obvious main entrance. It’ll be fine.”

To get to the Royal Palace we had to take a river bus, which was massively fun. They were big, long boats, which people crammed onto in numbers beyond the boat’s capacity as the moment when the gate was closed seemed to depend more on the whims of the gate master than the number of people who’d gone through. We managed to get a seat, but then I kind of wished we hadn’t as it meant I could see directly into the water and panicked every time I saw what looked exactly like a man’s head floating on the surface of the river. Incidentally, have you ever noticed how much coconuts look like severed heads when they’re floating in water? The boat ride offered the same views of stark poverty next to incredible affluence that we’d seen in so many other places: monolithic hotels hotels loomed over rows of wooden shacks, which clung to the river bank as if they’d been pushed as far as they could go before falling in.

Christmas Morning. Of course.

S-21 Genocide Museum.

The walls surrounding the palace are about five metres high, completely white and, arriving at the north west corner we had no idea in which direction the “main entrance” I had been so sure existed was. We set off in one direction, the height and seemingly-endless length of the wall giving the feeling that we were running the wrong way on a conveyor belt, and found the exit. Crowds of Thai people dressed in black and holding photos of the recently-deceased king were spilling out onto the street, stopping for a chat, and queueing up for free bottles of water and packets Monster Munch which were being given out in posts set up in the street in such numbers it made our going even slower, albeit a little tastier. We rounded a corner, and another corner, went through a police check-point, had our passports checked, took a number, joined the line, ordered two kilos of gouda and a pork pie, before we finally arrived at what had to be the main entrance. We were by now half an hour late and there was no sign, either of our friends or to indicate that the door we were looking at was even the door we’d agreed to meet at. Given that when Ben and I had agreed to meet at the “main entrance” we may as well have agreed to meet at “the main tree in the park”, it was probably more our fault and less the fault of the lack of signage. We waited for a while and then, as the cheese was getting heavy and we realised we were hungry and don’t like pork pies, we left in search of lunch and wifi.

Wifi hadn’t been hard to find in Thailand up until that point, and I don’t think it is, generally, unless you’re desperately trying to get in contact with people who you haven’t been able to meet because you were either late to the right meeting point, or at the wrong meeting point at the right time, or you’re hallucinating you really have friends and want to text them and check, and we were all of those things. After tramping round the centre of Bangkok for enough time for my feet to start hurting (that’s a standard unit of measurement), laughing at Thailand’s Democracy Monument (more like Democracy Memorial, hoho) and declining to buy more golden buddha statues than there are severed heads in the Chao Phraya river (coconuts, I meant coconuts), I finally had my second terrible idea of the day. “Khaosan Road has bars, and bars have wifi,” I stated, like an idiot who didn’t know that Khaosan Road is an avenue taken straight from hell and placed on this earth to remind people where you’ll go if you do too many bad things. We paid a tuk tuk driver far more than the two-minute drive was worth to take us there (we were wifi-less, remember, so didn’t know where it was. Plus my feet hurt), sat down at a bar playing a CD of kids singing Christmas songs, on repeat, and ordered a beer and the wifi password.

When it’s half past five on Christmas eve, you’ve failed to do everything you set out to do, a group of seven-year-olds are singing in your ear and a group of twenty-something-year-olds on the next table are drunkenly harassing the street vendors, stopping every one of them and asking to see their products, the one tick not becoming two ticks is The. Worst. Fucking. Thing. As hostel was so very, very far, we didn’t want to go all the way back there in order to come all the way to the centre again and so we ordered another beer, and another, and by the time the ticks went blue I was drunk and didn’t care any more. When Ben and Hanne finally showed up (they’d been even later than us to the - one of many possible - meeting points, seen we weren’t there, and gone into the palace) we were so happy to see them, and so full of beer, we agreed to go with them to a ping pong show. If you don't know what a ping pong show is then hurrah! Skip the next paragraph and pretend I never said anything.

What follows is something I never thought I’d say, and I’m very ashamed of it. I went to a ping pong show. In Bangkok. On Christmas morning. Not that it would have been any less bad had it not been December 25th. The experience left us quite depressed, and I spent the next day (Christmas Day) reading about the sex trade in Asia, and feeling like an awful, awful person for having contributed to its continued existence. The only solace I take from the experience is that I may have a stronger platform to denounce these shows - you can disagree with something more fervently if you’ve seen it with your own eyes, right? I can undo my own reasoning easily; I’ve never seen capital punishment or torture first hand, yet I think my positions on both are quite unwavering. But it's the positive spin I’m trying to put on something I can only say made me deeply sad.

On a brighter note, we left Bangkok on Boxing Day, and travelled to Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia and - the brightness ends there - home to the S-21 genocide museum. Cambodia, after been bombed massively by the anti-communist side of the war in Vietnam, was taken over by the communist Khmer Rouge in 1975. Although at first they were welcomed, and even celebrated by the people of Cambodia, the regime quickly started a social engineering project which involved torturing and killing all perceived enemies. In the eyes of the Khmer Rouge - who wanted to return Cambodia to complete and total agrarianism - dissenters were anyone who didn't fit the aesthetic of a field worker. Being educated, or even wearing glasses and having the air of an academic, became reasons for suspicion and arrest - despite Pol Pot (no relation to Pól… he says) having been educated in France and a number of the Khmer Rouge leaders themselves being bespectacled (these guys were hypocritical idiots, as despotic leaders tend to be). We visited the S-21 museum. It’s been left very much as it was found when the regime fled after the Vietnam invasion in 1979; the blood is still on the floors, the walls are still topped with barbed wire, nets to prevent suicide still line the upper levels, the only change is the addition of rows and rows of photographs showing the mug shots of the thousands of Cambodians of all ages, male and female,  who passed through the prison (one of many), and ended up as bones in the killing fields. There's a fantastic audio guide which narrates you through the abandoned classrooms and adds first-hand accounts from the tiny number of survivors and letters written by the victims, giving even more humanity to the sad images of broken bodies and desperate faces. I had seen images of torture recently - in the Human Rights Museum in Santiago de Chile - but somehow the addition of standing in the spot where the brutality depicted in the photos had been carried out added an extra impact that left me so light-headed and nauseated I had to have six coca cola's before I could continue.

It's mad to think this happened just one generation ago: that people my age will have absent grandparents due to the killing mechanisms of torture and total self-sufficiency which deprived people of medicine to treat the most curable diseases. The policy was if it wasn't produced in Cambodia, it wasn't used in Cambodia. And people died. It’s almost seems like the idea of putting your country and its strength and identity before the needs of the population could lead to tragedy. Thank god no idiot is trying such an inward-looking blindly-nationalist policy these days. #CambodiaFirstDidntWork. Outside the walls of S-21 Phnom Penh, of course, is a functioning and typically southeast Asian city. I wish we could have spent more time in Cambodia and visited other areas of the country. But Vietnam, and some idea we had of normal life - work and a home - was calling and so, four nights after we arrived we left, catching The Last Bus of Trip, bound for Saigon, sad to leave, but we'll probably have to go back in three months to renew our visas so it's ok.